On a recent weekend afternoon, I found myself locked in a small room with a group of 10 strangers. We'd all gone in willingly, and the attendants had assured us that we'd be set free after 90 minutes if need be.

But that's not what we wanted. We wanted to earn our freedom.

The only way to do it was to unleash our deductive powers on the clues that had been scattered in profusion around the room, ostensibly by other-worldly spirits. We had no instructions and no guidelines, but there were cryptic messages everywhere - under the furniture, inside objects, behind false panels - and we didn't have much time to find and decipher them all if we wanted to make our escape.

What I and my fellow puzzle aficionados had signed on for was the Real Escape Game, a live-action entertainment running 16 times a week at New People, the Japantown center devoted to Japanese pop culture, or J-Pop, of all kinds.

This entertainment originated about six years ago in Japan (there are standing installations in Tokyo and Kyoto) and was brought here in 2012 by Seiji Horibuchi, the president and CEO of New People.

"My vision is to try to bring all forms of Japanese pop culture to the United States," he says. "And escape games are one of the most original forms of pop culture to emerge in Japan.

The setup is as simple as it is devious. The game accommodates up to 11 people at a time, so players can come in cohorts or be teamed up with like-minded strangers.

Once inside the room, which is about 1,000 square feet, players race to locate anything and everything that might turn out to be a clue. Some - a message scrawled on a piece of paper, say - are trivial to find but harder to know just what to do with. For many other clues (my lips are sealed), simply detecting their presence is more than half the battle.

Solving the puzzles requires no special knowledge - they're not tests of trivia mastery, for example - and the entire game is in English. But unlike in a linear treasure hunt, in which one clue leads to the next, a big part of the pleasure of this quest lies in figuring out how all the pieces are meant to fit together.

The idea is to let players participate as protagonists in their own adventures, says Yuki Iwata of Scrap Entertainment, the Japanese company that created the game.

"When you see a movie, you can be part of it emotionally, but not physically," she says. "The hero is always someone else. In this game, the hero is you."

Browser game

In its most rudimentary form, the room-escape game is a type of computer browser game, a point-and-click adventure built with Flash or similar software.

"The basic premise is that you find yourself in a room with a locked door," says Lisette Wacker, who reviews room-escape games for the website Jay Is Games, "and you have to explore everything in the room to try to get out. For example, if something is bolted down, you have to look for a wrench, or you might find a code scratched into the wall that will open a lock."

Japanese developers have been turning these out for at least a decade, she says, and the most successful examples still tend to come from there.

"The best games are the ones that proceed in a very logical way, without too many lateral leaps but still with enough red herrings to keep it interesting. It's amazing how many little puzzles the top developers can pack in there."

Transferring the room-escape genre from the computer to the real world brings some obvious benefits. There's a visceral delight in manipulating actual objects rather than digital images, and the live game avoids the frustrating pixel-hunting that can be the bane of computer games.

And players in the Real Escape Game are attended by discreet but helpful guides who, without giving anything away, can help them avoid the occasional wasteful blind alley.

At one point, my team was usefully dissuaded from dismantling some of the electrical wiring - not because it would have been dangerous, perhaps, but because it would have been a waste of our quickly dwindling solving time.

Live escape games came in a variety of sizes and formats. One game in Japan had as many as 1,000 people playing simultaneously in a large venue. In January, Scrap staged a game aboard the SS Jeremiah O'Brien at Fisherman's Wharf, designed for 15 to 20 small teams at once.

The current game is the handiwork of Ryoma Ike and Kazuya Iwata, two soft-spoken, wizardly inventors who have crafted similar entertainments in Japan. They approached Horibuchi with the notion of importing the game to the United States, only to get a skeptical response.

800 tickets

"When they first came to me with the idea, I thought it was unrealistic," Horibuchi says. "Who would want to come just to solve these puzzles? But then we sold out 800 tickets the first week they went on sale, and I was convinced."

The first game, "Escape from the Werewolf Village," ran for four weeks last March. The current game opened in December and has been extended through the end of April - or as long as tickets keep selling.

"Once the sales start to die down," says Horibuchi, "we can change the contents of the room to something else."

This much is for sure - the game is not easy. It is designed to be solved by no more 5 percent of players, and the organizers say that so far only 4 out of 131 have cracked the puzzle.

So what about our team - did we make it out of the room on our own steam? Well, no. But we came thiiiiis close. Another five minutes and we would've solved it.